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How Residential School Students Became Victims of Nazi Race Science

Torn from loved ones, Indigenous children suffered brutal medical injustices

In 2000, David Napier, a freelance journalist then based in Toronto, produced a long story about Indigenous residential schools. It appeared in the Anglican Journal, an “independent” newspaper of the Anglican Church with a large circulation (now about 38,000). The Journal’s editor, David Harris, recruited Napier at the suggestion of former Saturday Night magazine editor John Fraser to spend a year criss-crossing the country to find out what had transpired in residential schools and tell the stories of any survivors and staff who would speak with him.

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Napier’s groundbreaking story brought the grim facts of the schools to a readership that needed to understand what had gone on but was unlikely to plow through the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples or John Milloy’s or J. R. Miller’s well-documented works on residential schools.

The Journal was interested in the schools because, following the revelatory hearings of the Royal Commission, residential school survivors had filed about 7,000 lawsuits against the churches that ran the schools until 1969 (after which time the federal government took them over and did no better) and the federal government. A few claims had already been adjudicated, resulting in large damage awards. The churches were staring at the likelihood that many more claims would succeed. Church bankruptcies were probable.

While doing exploratory documentary research at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Napier came upon correspondence about a nutrition experiment led by a federal civil servant—Lionel Pett, the leading nutritionist in the Department of Health and Welfare—that was conducted in six residential schools between 1948 and 1952. The point of the experiment was to see which, if any, of several vitamin and mineral supplements might make a difference to the health of the generally malnourished students. The students, in other words, were known by the bureaucrats in charge of the schools to be malnourished: that was why they were useful as human subjects.

Five of the six schools each tested a different supplement. The sixth school was used as a control. Some of the students within the five schools were also used as controls and given no supplements. The study ran for five years, during which time the students essentially remained malnourished and hungry.

In addition to the basic facts of the experiment, which were bad enough, Napier found a damning memo from H. K. Brown, then chief of the Dental Health Division of Indian Health Services, to his then colleague G. Leroux, the assistant director, asking that no dental prophylaxis or sodium fluoride be used on the students during the experiment’s five-year course. Dental problems go hand in hand with vitamin deficiencies, and watching for them to appear or be relieved was part of the experiment.

The Journal’s editor tracked down Pett, who was, by then, living in a retirement home in British Columbia. Napier interviewed him on the phone. Pett told Napier he had no regrets about doing the study.

Napier, editor David Harris, and freelance handling editor Moira Farr decided to run the story on Pett’s experiment separate from their main opus on the schools. They gave it front-page treatment, and it was noticed. The day the story came out, Napier spent all day on the phone explaining what he’d found to reporter after reporter from the CBC. (Months later, the New York Times ran a front-page story above the fold.) But after that first rush of phone calls, media interest dissipated. The editor at the Anglican Journal was soon out of a job.

In 2013, Ian Mosby, now a historian of food and “the politics of settler colonialism” at Toronto Metropolitan University—but then a post-doc at the University of Guelph—published a lengthy paper in the academic journal Histoire Sociale/Social History. His paper gave the historical context for Pett’s nutrition experiment that Napier had reported on and also described two nutrition surveys of Indigenous people led by scientists working for the Canadian government and major institutions such as McGill University and the US Public Health Service.

Mosby’s article caused a stir in the national and international media as well as in the bioethics community. Mosby gave a detailed exposition of Pett’s nutrition experiment (mentioning Napier in two footnotes). Starting in 1948, according to Mosby, Pett and his colleagues tested nutrition supplements on about a thousand children in five residential schools. It had been well known for years within the departments responsible for services to reserves and for the residential schools that the kids were not properly fed. During the Depression, the government had cut back on the per-capita grants it paid to the churches, making it impossible to improve........

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